At the end of the federal
executive council meeting of Wednesday, Babatunde Fashola, minister of works
and housing, briefed reporters on the plan of the Buhari administration to
reintroduce toll gates scrapped by ex-President Olusegun Obasanjo in 2004.
Fashola, who was joined by Lai
Mohammed, his information counterpart, said there is no law against toll plazas
in the country.
He added that some of the
logistics being worked out before the reintroduction include acquiring more
lands that will provide up to 10-lane plazas.
“Where are we in PPP and toll
gate, let me just clarify this impression about toll gates. There is no reason
why we cannot toll, there is no reason. There was a policy of government to
abolish tolls or as it were, dismantle toll plazas but there is no law that
prohibits tolling in Nigeria today,” he had said.
“We expect to return toll plazas,
we have concluded their designs of what they will look like, what material they
will be rebuilt with, what new considerations must go into them. What we are
looking out now and trying to conclude is how the backend runs. And that is
important because we want to limit significantly if not totally eliminate cash
at the plazas while ensuring that electronic devices that are being used do not
impede rapid movement.”
When the government of
ex-President Goodluck Jonathan made a similar move in 2011, Mohammed kicked
against it vehemently, referring Jonathan to his inaugural speech.
As the then spokesman of the
Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN), Mohammed issued a statement where he
described the move as a “string of obnoxious policies” of Jonathan’s
government.
“President Goodluck Jonathan, in
his inaugural speech, said ‘the urgent task of my Administration is to provide
a suitable environment for productive activities to flourish’. How can that
happen now that his administration is emasculating Nigerians with a series of
anti-people policies?” he had asked.
“Perhaps the President needs to
read his own inaugural speech again so he can redirect his energy toward making
life more abundant for the people, instead of inflicting sufferings of Biblical
proportion on them.
“Is the federal government aware
of the deplorable state of the roads across the country before contemplating
the re-introduction of toll gates? No one should ever be made to pay for
services not rendered.
“It is a cruel irony that the
toll gates that were removed seven years ago when the roads in the country were
still fairly motorable are to be reinstated now that the roads have virtually
disappeared. Nigerians daily die on the traps that the roads have become, and
all a government can say is that it will impose tolls on the same people. What
style of governance is this?
“The ideal thing would have been
for the government to begin a massive rehabilitation of the roads across the
country, then allow Nigerians to ride freely on these roads for some time, if
only to make up for the years they have suffered on the roads, before any
contemplation of reinstating toll gates.”
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